WE LOVE a good house of horror story. It is surprisingly seasonal. Close the curtains, open a box of chocolates and prepare to frighten yourself half to death.

Two weeks ago we were quivering wrecks after three episodes at Crickley Hall, watching the headmaster beat those children. Last week, The Making Of A Lady (Sunday, ITV1) took us to another drafty pile but this time ghosts were all too real. The threat in this thriller came in the guise of an Indian woman, her disgraced army officer husband and their servant. What a fine, nasty trio they made.

The one-off drama was an adaptation of a “forgotten” Frances Hodgson Burnett story. It began gently enough with an air of Downton Abbey wafting through the corridors.

“Tell me about Rhode Island at this time of year,” said one diner politely.

The drama, however, centred on Linus Roache’s upstanding Lord Walderhurst who was in want of a wife so he asked sweet but penniless Emily to marry him.

She could not believe her luck and debated the proposition in her mind for at least three seconds. She even said: “I thought I would marry for love.” Of course you did. Take the money, dear. Where was this going, you wondered? Was he a secret tyrant? However, it wasn’t Walderhurst who was to be feared, even though he immediately showed Lady Emily into the stately home’s priest hole next to the main bedroom: “He’s behind you!”

The danger lay with Walderhurst’s nephew, James D’Arcy’s dissolute army officer who had been sent home from India by his regiment. Captain Alec had his eye on the prize: inheriting the big house.

While the story was one dimensional, it was engaging enough as you waited to see how and when Captain Alec would do the dirty deed. Finally, he declared: “We have to kill her tonight!” In the end, he was gunned down by the spirited lady’s maid; Lady Emily was poisoned but survived and Walderhurst swept home from India wondering what all the fuss was about. It was, yes, happily ever after, and they all packed their bags for Rhode Island.

Equally scary but with unintended tinges of comedy was Evacuate Earth (National Geographic, Monday), part of the impressively named End Of The World Week. By the way, if you are reading this, the world has not indeed ended, as predicted for December 21. Still, why pass up the opportunity to find out just what we would do if our time was up? In this two-hour documentary, which was spookily cut short by 30 minutes on my Sky box because of “a power failure”, a neutron star had exploded in a galaxy far, far away and we had 75 years to work out how to “evacuate” the planet. Or if you are over 50, have a nice party and save yourself the worry.

From the start, I was delighted with the amount of certainty on offer from the mostly American academics who offered doom-laden prophecies like: “It’s impossible to say it will never happen,” before adding: “We have a false impression of the future.”

Do we really? Surely we just hope we have one.

It was touching to realise that the initial meteor storm would kill 280,000 people. If you’re lucky, you would have gone then. If the molten rock didn’t get you, most scientists predicted that the majority of the population, or 99 per cent, would fail to make the DNA cut for the inevitable master race aboard the spaceship.

Oh dear. Apparently there would be civil war too, as we all rowed with each other about who should go. Don’t worry, though: there was no certainty that we could even build a spaceship good enough to take us to another galaxy. Finally though, there appeared one straight-faced scientist who gave me a reason to feel optimistic about the future. When we are all on that journey to a new galaxy, he suggested: “We’re looking for the Goldilocks Zone [on which to land].” Of course you are. It’s right next to the Alice In Wonderland Zone.Nigella Lawson got me in the mood for Christmas, although the mere act of watching this show is liable to expand your waistline by several inches.

You always were a bit flamboyant

Mary

Nigellissima – An Italian Christmas (BBC2, Monday) seemed to take its lead from Heston Blumenthal with such concoctions as Pancetta Porridge. What? Then I saw the word “Italian” in the title.

I am gladdened to see, too, that the budgets have gone up on her show.

Watching her swan around Venice was particularly impressive, as was using egg whites from a carton. It used to be that life was too short to stuff a mushroom. Now it is too short to separate an egg.

She also uses “CSI gloves” to squish yucky sausages. Soon she will just employ someone else to cook the dishes on her show while she leans against the pantry shelf dreaming up inedible things to do with radicchio. My personal Christmas cooking highlight was The Great British Bake-Off Christmas Special (BBC2, Tuesday), with rising stars Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry. For goodness sake, give these two a series of their own; they are brilliant together. Yes, you can have too many cooks but in this case Hollywood and Berry do a wonderfully cheeky mother-and-son routine.

“You always were a bit flamboyant,” suggests Mary with a twinkle. Each cook adores the other’s recipes but the show wasn’t a complete love-in, except when Hollywood was stuffing his face with Mary’s latest cake.

He is yet to discover the joys of the cake fork. Perhaps that will happen in the next series.